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Bitmain, the largest mining hardware company, made around $4B last year

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Re: Bitmain, the largest mining hardware company, made around $4B last year

#91

Post by VMG »

nosuchthing wrote: post #40
bogomipz wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>" we could dedicate a small fraction of that to engineering better consensus algorithms." Can you elaborate on what the shortcomings of the current consensus algorithms are?

Immense waste, and lack of egalitarianism. Proof-of-Work consensus algorithms (so far) work by wasting more and more energy. Max efficiency peaks in the network with a very basic CPU PoW algorithm merely sets a lottery number granting write access for a single computer Every additional increase in processing power reduces efficiency by increasing the size of the number to be guessed All PoW does is increase the capit…

It's only wasted if there was a cheaper alternative. There isn't.

Re: Bitmain, the largest mining hardware company, made around $4B last year

#92

Post by doots »

seanwilson wrote: post #85
nosuchthing wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nano (aka Raiblocks) is basically a scam. How was the supply produced and distrubited? https://raiblocks.net/page/frontiers.php?limit=100 Nano/Raiblocks were created from software, a reproducable distributed database protocol. Except in the case of Nano, the vast majority of the tokens are in control of the owners with a few being given away to the public for clicking captchas. https://www.youtube.com/results?search_…

> Except in the case of Nano, the vast majority of the tokens are in control of the owners Do you have evidence of this?

What evidence is there 90% of Nano distribution isn't owned by a single person?

This is a major aspect of transparency in decenteralized p2p protocols, and the issue with Nano is there's no paper trail or proof that the devs didn't take all the supply.

We do know 13% of all Nano in circulation was stolen in the Bitgrail hack.

Re: Bitmain, the largest mining hardware company, made around $4B last year

#93

Post by wyager »

kenneth wrote: post #9

As an engineer, it saddens me to see the huge inefficiencies inherent to cryptocurrency mining these days. Surely, when we're spending in the billions on wasteful hashing, we could dedicate a small fraction of that to engineering better consensus algorithms. Unfortunately, we have an ecosystem where everyone is incentivized to ignore the problem because they're too invested in maintaining the price of Bitcoin and oth…

> we could dedicate a small fraction of that to engineering better consensus algorithms.

I wish people would dedicate a few minutes to reading about theoretical limits on consensus mechanisms.

Re: Bitmain, the largest mining hardware company, made around $4B last year

#94

Post by School-Cotton »

snitko wrote: post #78
kenneth wrote: post #9

As an engineer, it saddens me to see the huge inefficiencies inherent to cryptocurrency mining these days. Surely, when we're spending in the billions on wasteful hashing, we could dedicate a small fraction of that to engineering better consensus algorithms. Unfortunately, we have an ecosystem where everyone is incentivized to ignore the problem because they're too invested in maintaining the price of Bitcoin and oth…

Have a sense of proportion. Think about how much electricity, paper, waste and money is spent to keep up the banking industry, anti-fraud departments, AML/KYC compliance teams, clerks and all that show. Bitcoin is actually an improvement.

But Bitcoin doesn’t provide the services that the banking industry does. Bitcoin is more comparable to physical gold than to a modern bank account. Banking was built on top of gold (and later fiat) because it provides valuable services. If bitcoin becomes a widely-used currency then the same banking system will be built on top of Bitcoin.

Re: Bitmain, the largest mining hardware company, made around $4B last year

#95

Post by s73v3r_ »

jacobr wrote: post #44
nosuchthing wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Proof-of-Stake statistically equates to "Give the rich more money". Consider Ethereum's stats (and other similar PoS minting methods): Presale ICO / Premine ( max cost $0.50 USD per ETH ) = 72,009,990 ETH Total Supply today (Feb 23rd 2018) = 97,800,000 ETH Source: https://etherscan.io/stat/supply Now imagine a financial system where all the wealthy have to do simply own money (spawned from software or premine) to get…

With PoW you use your money to buy mining equipment and you will get more money, and voting power. With PoS you buy more of the currency with that money instead.

Right, but the rest of us also have to suffer due to the economic repercussions (or being unable to get an affordable graphics card without waiting forever)

Re: Bitmain, the largest mining hardware company, made around $4B last year

#96

Post by zodiac »

nosuchthing wrote: post #74
zodiac wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's your proposal for a more egalitarian reward model for block producers (in any consensus model)?

Equal payment for the same work/processing power.

What does that concretely mean?

Re: Bitmain, the largest mining hardware company, made around $4B last year

#97

Post by hiccuphippo »

kenneth wrote: post #9

As an engineer, it saddens me to see the huge inefficiencies inherent to cryptocurrency mining these days. Surely, when we're spending in the billions on wasteful hashing, we could dedicate a small fraction of that to engineering better consensus algorithms. Unfortunately, we have an ecosystem where everyone is incentivized to ignore the problem because they're too invested in maintaining the price of Bitcoin and oth…

I wonder what happened to primecoin. Could Bitcoin switch to such a PoW in the future?

Re: Bitmain, the largest mining hardware company, made around $4B last year

#99

Post by deepnotderp »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #50
gigatexal wrote: post #22

I've moved to coins that are asic-tough

“ASIC-resistance” just means “needs lots of RAM”. Eventually someone will figure out how to make oodles of RAM sufficient for a many-core custom processor. Heck, modern SSDs (e.g. Intel Optane) might be fast enough to replace DRAM for these kinds of applications. Another kind of ASIC-resistance might be using dynamically-generated algorithms employing self-modifying code. You’d have to own a Xeon Phi to get good figu…

Optane is phase change memory, not flash, and neither has the necessary endurance to do well.

Re: Bitmain, the largest mining hardware company, made around $4B last year

#100

Post by atomical »

curuinor wrote: post #82
curyous wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin mining seems inefficient now, but when the network is carrying 100x more or 10,000x more transactions, won't it be extremely efficient? (On a per-transaction basis)

There have now been about a half-dozen various suggestions to get the network to carry more transactions, all of which are mostly failures, except for Lightning Network, which is now in the process of becoming a failure.

Lightning is DOA. Who has ever heard of opening a payment channel to buy a cup of coffee?
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